“Could you please stop pacing, Doc?” Harry Nautilus said. “It’s driving me nuts.”
Nautilus rolled a chair behind Dr Alan Traynor, bumping the back of Traynor’s knees. The psychiatrist half sat, half fell, into the chair.
“I’m trying to stay calm,” the acting head of the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior mumbled. He ran pink fingers through thinning white hair, tiny blue eyes twitching behind wire-framed bifocals. “It’s all so mystifying. What would make Dr Prowse do such a thing?”
Nautilus sat another chair in the book-filled office that had belonged to Dr Evangeline Prowse. He rolled toward Traynor until their knees touched, hoping to lock the nervous shrink in place.
“I need to understand Dr Prowse’s last few weeks.”
Nautilus had left Mobile at six a.m. He’d spent most of the drive on the phone with the State Police, making sure they were working together, not at odds. For now, the death of Dr Prowse was being disseminated as inconclusive. That a patient was missing was being played close to the vest. Had Jeremy Ridgecliff been prowling the Alabama countryside, there would have been a full shrieking alert. Roadblocks. Helicopters. Bloodhounds.
“Dr Traynor?” Nautilus prompted. “Did you notice anything strange?”
“Like I told the State Police, I wasn’t here. She sent me and the three other senior staffers to a conference in Austin. It was last minute and strange.”
“Strange how?”
“The conference had little bearing on what we do at the Institute. It was on interpersonal dynamics, personality assessments, psychometrics …” Traynor’s hand rose to cover his mouth. “Oh Lord. Do you think Dr Prowse sent us to Austin to keep us away while all …the bad stuff was going on?”
“I don’t know enough to answer that. Was anything unusual?”
Nautilus watched Traynor’s face contort through memories. “She’d been nervous the past three or so weeks. But there wasn’t any major incident. One thing stood out, though it wasn’t recent. About six weeks back I was working second shift. Near midnight, I saw the Doctor in her office. I poked my head in, asked if I could help with anything. She said she was perplexed by a case.”
“I’d figure perplexing cases were pretty standard here.”
“She was more than perplexed, she was upset, though trying to hide it. I asked if I could help with anything. She said there might be confidentiality issues involved.”
“Confidentiality holds in here?” Nautilus frowned down the long white hall toward the patient section of the Institute, separated by shining steel doors. Every fifty feet of wall held a button labeled Emergency. It wasn’t referring to fires.
“Not at the Institute,” Traynor said. “But doctor-patient privileges could have been involved if she was talking about a private client.”
Nautilus raised an eyebrow. “Why would a world-renowned specialist like Dr Prowse want to see folks with sibling rivalries, panic attacks …”
“The standard afflictions? She wouldn’t. For Dr Prowse to accept an individual patient, he or she would be very compelling in some way. Of interest.”
“I’d imagine she sees all kinds of ‘interesting’ in here,” Nautilus said. “Jeremy Ridgecliff, for example.”
Traynor nodded. “Patricide following years of childhood abuse, mental and physical. That wasn’t overly unusual, a child reaching the breaking point, taking revenge. What was unusual was the shifting of anger to a disconnected mother, or rather, surrogates. And the startling amount of physical violence inflicted on his victims. Unfortunately …” Traynor shrugged, shook his head.
“Unfortunately what, Doctor?”
“Dr Prowse never fully opened Ridgecliff up. She figured ways to keep him calm and fairly reality based – that in itself was a monumental success – but she never reached the primal judgment.”
“Primal judgment?”
“Sorry …a term the Doctor and I used for the underlying motivator in killings. Another staffer calls it ‘The Fire that lights all fires’.”
“I thought abuse was the underlying factor.”
“That’s the fact of the case. The primal judgment is how the patient transforms that fact into his own beliefs. How the fact is perceived, interpreted and, in Jeremy Ridgecliff’s case, turned into a murderous impulse against women.” Traynor raised a wispy eyebrow, a note of condescension in his voice. “The concept is perhaps a bit difficult for the layman. A drunken and abusive man beats three sons. One son reads it as a form of contact, a misshapen display of love, and manages to love his father back. The second interprets it as hatred, responds in kind. The third son …” Traynor paused, tapped his fingers to his chin, trying to come up with an example.
“The third son,” Nautilus said, “might do something wholly different, such as judging the pain to be a message from God or Allah or the Universal Oneness – a sign that he’s been chosen for something, and the suffering is necessary.”
Traynor stared at Nautilus as if seeing him for the first time.
“Exactly, Detective. But Dr Prowse never found Jeremy Ridgecliff’s primal judgment, probably because he knew she was looking for it. They danced around the subject, almost playfully at times.”
“Playfully?”
“Both knew it was serious business, but Jeremy Ridgecliff had his whole life to play the game, his form of hide-and-seek. He held tight to his secrets.”
“So the two, uh, toyed with one another. Is that the right word?”
“Ridgecliff could actually be puckish. And wholly charming, when he wished. Lovable, almost. If you didn’t know his history.”
Lovable. Nautilus tumbled the word in his mind. Dr Evangeline Prowse was a friend of his partner. If Carson had a blind spot, it was overlooking imperfections in those close to him. Nautilus narrowed an eye at the nervous Traynor and decided to push him a bit.
“Tell me about the phenomenon known as transference, Doctor.”
Traynor frowned. “There’s no way Dr Prowse would allow transference to occur.”
“Transference of romantic feelings from patient to therapist …all kinds of patients fall for their therapists. Sometimes those vices get versa’d, right? The docs fall for the patients?”
The psychiatrist’s forehead reddened with anger. “There’s no way Dr Prowse would ever have a relationship with a patient.”
“Then why did she go to such lengths to smuggle Ridgecliff out?”
“She didn’t smuggle him out. He made her do it.”
“It was Dr Prowse who changed guard schedules, falsified medical transfer papers, made up a half-dozen false scenarios over at least two weeks’ time. You yourself suspect she diverted you to a conference to get you out of the way. Maybe it was all her idea.”
“I just told you, that is impossible!”
“She did all this while he was locked up. No knife at her throat, gun at her back. It seems irrational. Which leaves emotion. Powerful emotion. What possible leverage could Ridgecliff hold over Dr Prowse except for an emotional one?”
Traynor stood abruptly, sending the chair toppling. “I don’t know, goddammit! I DON’T FUCKING KNOW!”
Nautilus glanced at the toppled chair, raised an eyebrow at Traynor. “And when this transference happens under everyone’s noses, there’s surprise and anger. That’s because of something called denial, right?”
The psychiatrist turned his head away.
Said, “Yes.”